Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.
~ Rem Koolhaas
We felt it was very important for an entity like CCTV to make its presence felt... To generate a space and to define a space, that is the main thing.
Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.
What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.
People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.
Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.
Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.
The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models.
Architecture is a rare collective profession: it's always exercised by groups. There is an essential modesty, which is a complete contradiction to the notion of a star.
There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.
Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.
